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Entertainment Education in Asian Nations Asia Pacific Media ducatE or Issue 9 Article 6 7-2000 Entertainment education in Asian nations E. Rogers University of New Mexico, US A. Singhal Ohio University, US Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/apme Recommended Citation Rogers, E. and Singhal, A., Entertainment education in Asian nations, Asia Pacific Media Educator, 9, 2000, 77-88. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/apme/vol1/iss9/6 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] EVERETT ROGERS & ARVIND SINGHAL: Entertainment ... Entertainment Education In Asian Nations “For the past ten years I had lost my way but Tinka Tinka Sukh showed me a new path of life....I used to be delinquent, aimless, and a bully. I harassed girls...one girl reported me to the police and I was sent to prison. I came home unreformed. One day I heard a program on radio....After listening to the drama, my life underwent a change....I started to listen regularly....Once I started listening to the radio program, all my other drawbacks and negative values were transformed.” (Birendra Singh Kushwaha, a tailor in the Indian village of Lutsaan). The purpose of the present paper is to summarize the main lessons learned from various entertainment-education projects conducted in Asian nations in recent years. We seek to draw understandings about the basic process of social change and development that result from the entertainment-education strategy. Everett Rogers Arvind Singhal University of New Mexico Ohio University ntertainment-education is the process of purposely designing Eand implementing a media message to both entertain and educate, in order to increase audience knowledge about an educational issue, create favorable attitudes, and change overt behavior (Singhal & Rogers, 1999, p. xii). The entertainment- education strategy uses the entertainment aspect of the media to attract a large-sized audience. The educational content of the media program features positive and negative role-models to depict the educational values that are being intentionally promoted. One reason for the generally effective impacts of entertainment-education is because entertainment-education uses communication and social psychological theories, especially Albert Bandura’s (1997; 1998) social cognitive theory (previously called social learning theory), as a basis for changing human behavior. Entertainment-education questions the needless dichotomy in most media content between entertainment versus education. ©AsiaPacific The purpose of entertainment-education is to facilitate MediaEducator social change, defined as the process in which an alternation occurs Issue No.9 in the structure and function of a social system. Social change can July-December 2000 AsiaPacific MediaEducator, Issue No. 9, July-December 2000 77 EVERETT ROGERS & ARVIND SINGHAL: Entertainment ... occur at the level of the individual, community or organization, or a society. For example, the quotation at the top of the present paper concerns individual-level change. But the tailor in the Indian village of Lutsaan also played a key role in organizing listening groups of audience members in his village, and to lead the way in the village’s rejection of dowry, a system-level change instigated by the entertainment-education radio soap opera Tinka Tinka Sukh (Pappa et al, in press). The educational issues frequently promoted by entertainment-education media programs have included female equality, family planning, HIV/AIDS prevention, adult literacy, and environmental conservation (Singhal & Rogers, 1999). Most such educational issues are of unquestioned good. The Rise Of How did the strategy of entertainment-education come Entertainment about? The idea of combining entertainment with education is Education not new: It goes as far back in human history as the timeless art of storytelling. For thousands of years, music, drama, dance, and various folk media have been used in many countries for recreation, devotion, reformation, and instructional purposes. So while the concept of combining entertainment with education is not new, “entertainment-education” is a relatively new concept. The use of this communication strategy in radio, television, comic books, and popular music, at least when designed according to communication and social psychological theories, is a matter of the past three decades (Singhal & Rogers, 1999; Valente et al.,1994). More than 100 entertainment-education projects of various kinds have been implemented, mainly in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. At least one-third of these projects were in Asian nations. In radio, the earliest well-known illustration of the entertainment-education strategy began in 1951, when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began broadcasting “The Archers”, a radio soap opera which carried educational messages about agricultural development (“The Archers” continues to be broadcast in 2000, addressing contemporary educational issues like HIV/AIDS prevention, environmental conservation, and the like). The entertainment-education strategy in television was discovered more-or-less by accident in Peru in 1969, when the television soap opera “Simplemente María” was broadcast (Singhal, Obregon, & Rogers, 1994). The main character, María, a migrant to the capital city, faced tragic setbacks, like becoming a single mother. María worked during the day, and enrolled in adult literacy classes in the evening. She then climbed the socio- economic ladder of success through her hard work, strong 78 AsiaPacific MediaEducator, Issue No. 9, July-December 2000 EVERETT ROGERS & ARVIND SINGHAL: Entertainment ... motivation, and through her skills with a Singer sewing machine. “Simplemente María” attracted very high audience ratings, and the sale of Singer sewing machines boomed in Peru. So did the number of young girls enrolling in adult literacy and sewing classes. When “Simplemente María” was broadcast in other Latin American nations, similar effects happened. Audience identification with María was very strong, especially among poor, working-class women: She represented a Cinderella role model for upward social mobility. Inspired by the audience success and the unintended educational effects of “Simplemente María”, Miguel Sabido, a television writer-producer-director in Mexico, developed a methodology for entertainment-education soap operas. Between 1975 and 1982, Sabido produced seven entertainment-education television soap operas (one each year), which helped motivate enrollment in adult literacy classes, encourage the adoption of family planning, promote gender equality, and so forth (Nariman, 1993). Sabido’s entertainment-education soap operas were also commercial hits for Televisa, the Mexican television network, demonstrating that educational messages do not limit the popularity of entertainment programs. Through these accidental and planned events of the past several decades, the idea of combining education with entertainment in the mass media was born and has since spread to over 100 projects in 50 countries, spurred by the efforts of institutions like Population Communications International (PCI), a non-governmental organization headquartered in New York City, and Johns Hopkins University’s Population Communication Services. The entertainment-education strategy has been widely invented and recreated by pioneering and creative media professionals in television, radio, film, print, and theater. The entertainment-education strategy can be applied in a wide variety of ways, but the essence of this strategy is to teach behavior change through providing positive and negative role- models for the educational behavior changes being promoted. The positive role-models are rewarded in the story line of the media program, and the negative role-models are punished. For example, in an entertainment-education radio soap opera promoting HIV/ AIDS prevention, a promiscuous male truck driver does not practice safe sex, contracts HIV, and eventually dies from AIDS (Rogers et al, 1999). In addition to the positive and negative role- models, entertainment-education interventions typically also feature transitional role-models, characters who initially are negative models but then change to become positive role-models. When they switch, some audience members who identify with them also experience behavior change. The methodology for AsiaPacific MediaEducator, Issue No. 9, July-December 2000 79 EVERETT ROGERS & ARVIND SINGHAL: Entertainment ... designing entertainment-education programs is based on Bandura’s social psychological theory, as applied by Miguel Sabido to television soap operas, and then modified and adapted by various media scholars and practitioners. Most evaluations of entertainment-education interventions show that they are relatively effective in bringing about behavior changes (Singhal & Rogers, 1999). However, some critics (for example, Sherry, 1997) have questioned the strength of the evaluation research designs used in these evaluations. Certainly, stronger designs are needed, and the general trend has been toward stronger designs, such as field experiments. Entertainment Education Here we review some of the most-widely studied applications of entertainment-education to radio and television Soap Operas soap operas in Asia. Hum Log” in India “Hum Log” was an attempt to blend Indian national television’s (Doordarshan’s) stated objectives of providing entertainment to its audience,
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